buzztard, valgrind and ...


This month I focused on testing for the next release. My free time for the project was a big short anyway, as my family move to our new home and I had quite some janitorial work to do.

One lesson learned for the start. Some time ago I had problems with tests going crazy and eating memory. This can bring down the whole system which is bad. My solution at this time setrlimit(RLIMIT_AS,&rl) to cap the memory usage. While that works, that is also one way to shoot yourself in the foot. I was wondering why tests that work flawlessly on 32bit systems fail with "mmap() failed: Cannot allocate memory". Doh, 64bit platforms need more memory than 32bit ones. Now I raised the limits unconditionally and everything is working again. Would be good to check the difference to see how much more memory 64bit apps that in average - its not twice as much I think.

I did lots of valgrinding and obviously found and squashed a few leaks. It would be really nice if each library would ship a suppression file as part of the dev package. The file could be installed to /usr/lib/valgrind/.supp. The pkg-config file would have two variables: 'vg_supp' pointing to the suppression file and 'vg_env' setting extra environment variables easing valgrinding. This way one could just collect these from the libraries an application uses and be done. GObject based libs could suppress their singletons to improve the valgrind experience.

From time to time potential users show up on irc and get scared when I ask them to build the latest version from the sources. In the need for having an easy way to offer testers and translators the latest version, I took a look at glick. It is actually pretty straight forward. The resulting glick files where initially somewhat large, but after pruning development files, they are just about 6 Mb. I have two of them online - one for 32bit and one for 64bit systems. How to use them? Just download and run them - they don't install anything. The only downside I can see so far is, that the glick bundle would use the same settings as the properly installed one, which could be harmful if different versions are run. Also the path to the example songs in the bundle is somewhat cryptic - /proc/self/fd/1023/share/buzztard/songs :/. Having better desktop integration of such bundles would be great too, but less see how glick evolves.

50 files changed, 836 insertions(+), 373 deletions(-)